Mine Are Spectacular!

by Janice Kaplan

  “I had the people at Chanel Scotchguard it. I had everything Scotchguarded—my clothes, the carpets, the couches, everything. All done. I’ve baby-proofed the house.”

  To the ordinary person, baby-proofing involves locking cabinets, covering sockets and fencing off staircases. But I’m finding there’s nothing ordinary about Berni.

  “Did you get that baby nurse you wanted?” I ask, hitting on our most-talked-about topic of the month.

  “No, I couldn’t meet her terms,” Berni says dispiritedly. “She demanded her own bedroom and bathroom suite. No problem since I have plenty of them. But then she wanted her own driver and a clothing allowance. Honestly, that’s a better deal than I negotiated for Sandra Bullock.”

  “Really? You represented her, too?”

  “Well, on her first deal. I discovered Sandy, you know,” she tells me.

  I carry a platter over and place it down in front of Berni, whom I met just three months ago—when we both moved into the moneyed suburb of Hadley Farms on the very same day. Me, to settle in with Bradford. Berni, freshly relocated from the West Coast with her film-editor husband Aidan, to embark on her new career. Motherhood. Both of us were slightly terrified about starting our new lives and we connected immediately. Berni might have moved three thousand miles, but I was the one on unfamiliar ground—having left my little rent-controlled apartment in Greenwich Village for Bradford’s fancy sprawling house. And it wasn’t just the shrubs that scared me. Although I still don’t know how much you should feed a hydrangea.

  “Do you miss Sandy?” I ask, using the nickname as if I, too, have known the plucky actress for years. “I mean, not just Sandy. Your whole L.A. life. It sounds like it was so glamorous.”

  “It was,” Berni admits, looking down and rubbing her beach ball–sized belly. “All those famous clients and fabulous movie premieres. The parties. The private jets. The night Russell Crowe got drunk and told me he had a thing for older women like me.”

  “Did he follow through?” I ask, probably sounding more like a magazine-reading fan than I should.

  “I never gave him the chance,” Berni says dismissively. “Besides, all that seems so unimportant to me now. So superficial. How can any of that compare to bringing two precious new lives into the world? I finally know what matters.” She breaks into a beatific smile that would give Mona Lisa a run for her money.

  I’ve heard this speech before. Now that she’s decided to chuck her high-powered career to be a stay-at-home mom, Berni talks about motherhood as if it’s the Second Coming. And in her case, having twins, the Second and Third Coming. She’s waited so long to be a parent that she’s treating it like her Next Big Project—and she’s expecting that heating formula will be as thrilling as creating the formula for the next box-office blockbuster. I’m doubtful, but who knows. There seem to be a lot of overachieving women lately who are trading the fast track for the cul-de-sac. Or in Berni’s case, for a ten-room Mediterranean mansion with a pool.

  A couple of weeks ago, I asked Berni why she and Aidan—who’ve been married a dozen years—waited so long to have kids.

  “Just an oversight,” she said, as if we were talking about how she’d walked out of Stop & Shop without buying a quart of milk. “I was so busy, I forgot.”

  And now that she’s remembered, she’s throwing herself into it full throttle. As Berni told me, whining superstars are good preparation for dealing with twins.

  “You must be hungry,” I say, offering her a fruit platter. “Have something.”

  “I’m starved, but this isn’t going to do it for me,” she says, not even tempted by my pretty papaya or perfectly-cut kiwis. “Don’t you have any Oreos? Chips Ahoy? Mini Mint Milanos? Really, anything that says Pepperidge Farm on it will be okay. The twins need some sugar.”

  “No, they don’t. How about some cheese?”

  “Only if you have Cheez Whiz. At least I know that one’s safe. Can’t risk anything unpasteurized when you’re pregnant.”

  “Camembert?” I offer.

  “No!” she screams, horrified. “Blue veins are the worst.”

  “They’ll go away after you deliver,” I promise, deadpan.

  “Very funny,” says Berni. “You know I can’t eat blue-veined cheese. It could carry listeria. Same problem with pastrami. Salmon has PCBs. Canned tuna has mercury. And don’t get me started on cookie dough ice cream. Raw eggs.”

  I’d forgotten how complicated pregnancy has become. Berni’s list of Things to Avoid While Pregnant is longer than Elle MacPherson’s legs. And it’s not just food. Without waiting a beat, Berni launches into her last-trimester lament.

  “I’ve gone nine months without whitening my teeth, tanning my skin, or bleaching my hair. Staying away from chemicals is harder than you think. I nearly killed the Chem-Turf guy and all he did was park his truck across the street.” Berni pauses and squares her shoulders to make her most important announcement. “And don’t even talk to me about how I’m going to lose all this weight. Seventy pounds. I know they’re twins and a lot of it’s water weight. But what am I delivering—the Atlantic Ocean?”

  I try to picture what Berni looked like before we both moved to Hadley Farms, our ultra-exclusive gated community just thirty-eight minutes north of the city. Not thirty-nine, as everyone is quick to point out. As if one more minute from Manhattan would be the deal breaker. And who named this place, anyway? How can you call it “Farms” when there’s not a thoroughbred or a heifer in sight? Or even anyone making goat cheese. All anyone makes here is money.

  “Anyway,” Berni continues, “maybe there’s hope. Sarah Jessica Parker’s giving me her personal trainer as a baby gift.”

  “I guess that trumps the two silver spoons from Tiffany’s I bought for you.”

  “Oh, stop. Nobody’s better than you,” she says, getting up and coming over to give me a generous hug. “You’re throwing me this baby shower. Way beyond the call. I can’t believe how lucky I am. I feel like we’ve been friends forever.”

  “It’s just that last trimester that feels like it’s been forever,” I say, laughing and hugging her back. “But I feel the same.”

  A chirping noise sounds in the apartment and Berni instinctively reaches for her cell phone. She holds it out and looks disappointed. “Not mine. I used to get sixty calls a day, but nobody calls a newly retired talent agent.” To me, that sounds like an improvement. But from Berni, it could be a complaint.

  The chirping continues. Doorbell? Intercom? Smoke detector? Nothing so mundane. I head to the kitchen. Maybe it’s Bradford’s high-tech refrigerator that has Internet access, a DVD flat-screen and beeps when the tomatoes are overripe. Or the self-propelling Roomba robot vacuum cleaner that bleeps when anything gets in its way. It could be any one of a hundred gizmos since everything in Bradford’s designer kitchen chirps. The only thing missing is a parakeet.

  Then I figure it out—the timer on the Viking stove. I rush over and pull out a tray of cheese puffs that haven’t puffed. Instead they’re flat and burned at the edges. I stare at them in disbelief. “This never happened to me before,” I tell Berni, who’s traipsed in behind me and is leaning against a wall in the breakfast nook that’s bigger than my whole West Village apartment. “In my old kitchen I had to bake in the toaster oven and everything was always perfect.”

  “What you’ve sacrificed for love,” Berni says, making fun of me. She comes over, pops a puff in her mouth and makes a face. “Gross,” she says, spitting it out into a napkin. “In this case the sacrifice might have been too great.”

  “I don’t think we’ll starve,” I say, dumping them into the garbage disposal and looking around at the counters piled high with trays of food I’ve spent two days preparing and managed not to burn.

  Another chirp. Again Berni reaches for her phone, but over the intercom, from the main gate half a mile away, booms the voice of the guard. Not that we’re allowed to call him that. The Hadley Farms Community Handbook requires he be addressed as “The
Doorman.” I thought I was moving out of Manhattan, but apparently everyone in this McMansioned community wants to pretend they’re still living on Fifth Avenue.

  “Hey, girls, it’s Enrique,” says the doorman. “How ya doin’? Party’s about to begin. Two hot ladies here for you.”

  “Send them over,” I say, back into the intercom. “And you don’t have to call for the rest.”

  “If the next batch look like this I’m coming over, too,” he shoots back.

  Berni looks amused. I turn away from the intercom and start to giggle. “Next to you, Enrique’s my favorite thing about Hadley Farms so far,” I tell her.

  I go to the door to welcome the first arrivals. Enrique’s “hot women” turn out to be Berni’s sixty-four-year-old mother Erica and an agent colleague of Berni’s named Olivia Gilford, who’s decked out in a black python suit and enough gold chains to stymie Houdini.

  “My god, you’re the size of an elephant,” Olivia says, greeting Berni and throwing her arms wide open to emphasize her point. “How can you stand being that big? Are you having second thoughts?”

  “It’s a little late for that,” says Berni.

  “Good thing you quit. If your clients saw you this way they’d die,” says Olivia. She heads over to grab a glass of wine from the bartender, hired for the afternoon from the hip New York employment agency Actors Behind Bars.

  “What a bitch,” I whisper to Berni. “I can’t wait to meet the rest of your friends.”

  “This one’s not a friend,” Bernie whispers back. “Rival. I invited her so I can keep an eye on her. If she’s here, she’s not out stealing my clients.”

  “But . . .” I start to say.

  “I know,” Berni interrupts. “I’m out of the game so I shouldn’t care anymore. But old habits die hard.”

  Guests keep arriving, and the house starts to fill. Well, the foyer, anyway. The entire Rose Bowl Parade could march through this place and you’d hardly notice. The women grab for the Rosenthal china and begin filling their plates.

  “What fabulous food,” says our pencil-slim Hadley Farms neighbor and community board president Priscilla, who looks like this could be her first meal in years.

  “Yes, fabulous. Who catered?” asks another equally slim and aerobicized woman as she forks down my pesto pasta. It used to be that skinny women waltzed through parties nibbling a celery stalk or the occasional carrot stick. Now the bar’s higher. To be truly admired, you have to be a size two while still wolfing down everything but the custom drapes. Once upon a time the crème-de-la-thin wouldn’t be caught dead eating in public. Now they do nothing but.

  Before I have the chance to take the credit for the catering, Priscilla interrupts. “I’d know this pecan chicken salad anywhere,” she says smugly. “It’s got to be Barefoot Contessa.”

  “I would have said the same,” says the other woman, now intently nibbling at a beef teriyaki skewer, “but I detect just a hint of Glorious Food.”

  “No, no,” says a third woman, now joining the fray. “The peach aphrodisiac salad just screams Colin Cowie. He sent something just like it to Barbados last year for our New Year’s party.”

  By now I’m too embarrassed to admit that my hands have touched the food, but I am thinking there may be a career in this for me.

  When we get to dessert, I invite the women to bring their plates into the library, where I offer a choice of coffees—Tahitian brew, Samoan simmer, or Costa Rican nugget. Talk about a coffee break. Feels like each cup should come with frequent flyer miles.

  Berni sinks into the oversized winged-back chair ready to attack her enormous pile of presents. I’m expecting to see a lot of Baby Gap booties and stretchies. But as paper and ribbons go flying, it quickly becomes clear that Berni’s unwrapping a whole new level of baby must-haves. Two cashmere Burberry baby blankets. An eighteen-karat gold David Yurman bunny bracelet. A Swarovski crystal box for the tooth fairy—who apparently would never think to look under a plain pillow in Hadley Farms. A Louis Vuitton diaper-changing bag. Then come the alphabet blocks. Finally something the babies can play with—if you trust your toddler with Steuben crystal.

  “My gift’s a little late,” says Olivia, looking worriedly at her watch and hurrying out of the room. Berni finishes opening her presents and somebody suggests making a hat out of the ribbons.

  “Or we can play pin the rattle on the donkey,” offers Berni’s mother Erica energetically. “I did that at a baby shower just last week.”

  But Olivia has another game in mind.

  “Look who’s here!” she calls out gaily from the foyer, as she ushers in a six-foot-tall blond policeman.

  “Did I do something wrong?” I ask, jumping up nervously. I can’t think what it would be. Maybe it’s against the law in this zip code to cater your own party.

  “Not yet,” he says slyly. “Now where’s the birthday girl?”

  “This is a baby shower,” I say, confused.

  “Okay, the birth-ing girl,” he says jocularly. And then he tosses his hat in the air and bends over to grab something from his belt. Oh my god, his gun? Reflexively, I fling my hands into the air.

  “Don’t shoot,” I plead. “I’m innocent.”

  “But I’m not,” he says. And as if on cue, the house fills with P. Diddy wailing from a mini-CD player, “Girl I’m a Bad Boy.”

  Our trusty patrolman starts unbuttoning his shirt and twirls his club in time to the music. I watch agog as the top comes off and he sends it flying into the crowd, revealing his bare, bronzed chest. Pretty buff, too—though why the heck are we looking at it?

  Olivia has the answer.

  “Happy shower!” she shouts to Berni, above the music. “My baby present to you—Patrolman Pete! The Cop Who Rocks!”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” says Pete, who in one swift motion rips the Velcro seam on his pants and steps casually out of them. He sidles up to nine-month-pregnant Bernie and swivels his hips—and his red bikini underwear—as close to her as he can get. He winks broadly, plays provocatively with his nightstick and makes his intentions clear. “This officer is not a gentleman!” he says, removing the leather belt that’s still at his waist and snapping it suggestively.

  I look around at my thirty guests. It’s a defining moment. One group, led by Olivia, is grinning, swaying to the music and waiting eagerly to see what happens next. Preferably to them. Next are the women who have a sudden need to clear away wineglasses, retrieve wayward wrapping or pick the lint off their skirts—anything but look at Pete. And then there’s Berni’s mother, who was only bargaining on a spirited game of pin the rattle on the donkey. But a spirited game of being pinned by Pete apparently has a certain allure, because she makes her way over to the edge of Berni’s chair, claiming her maternal right as heir to the throne.

  Pete, catching her drift, bends over suggestively and places his hat jauntily on her head.

  “You go, grandma!” Olivia cheers from the sidelines.

  “Nobody feels like a grandma when I’m around!” Pete promises, letting out a whoop. He wiggles to the edge of Berni’s chair and grabs mother Erica onto his dance floor. He grinds his pelvis in time to the Maroon 5 CD now blaring, bumping hips with Berni’s mom on every rotation.

  “Whooo!” she yelps, raising her own arms above her head. Then she drops them around Patrolman Pete’s neck and wriggles closer to his well-tanned body.

  “I’m lovin’ this woman,” Pete hoots, pressing against her tightly.

  Apparently, Berni thinks he may be doin’ too much lovin’, because she gets out of her chair. Up until now, Berni’s been a good sport, but this is her mother we’re talking about. The woman she’d like to think of as a virgin. And who no doubt feels the same about Berni, despite all evidence to the contrary. Daughters don’t want their mothers having sex and mothers don’t want their daughters having sex. And still we have a population explosion.

  “Nice dancing, mom,” Berni says. And then in an effort to break up the happy couple, she uses
her stomach as a wedge and plants herself between them. Patrolman Pete, though, misinterprets her move and thinks he’s scored a threesome. So what if the mother’s sixty-four and a little scrawny and the daughter’s nine months gone. By the time he recounts the afternoon’s activities to his buddies, those little details will drop by the wayside.

  “Lovin’ this, loving both of you!” he says grinding lustfully now in all directions. Erica shimmies her hips, but Berni stands there like a stick. Or in her case, an oak tree.

  “Loving time is just about over,” Berni says firmly. She takes the patrolman’s cap off her mom’s head and hands it back it to Pete. “Time to call it a wrap. Thanks for the memories.” And with that, she loops her arm through Pete’s elbow and escorts him toward the door. Make that drags him to the door, since he’s in no rush to leave.

  “I paid for a full hour,” says Olivia petulantly. “Pete doesn’t have to go.”

  “Yes he does,” says Berni. “You gotta know when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em.”

  Olivia, who definitely comes down on the side of wanting to hold him, instead hands Pete her card. “I’m a talent agent. If you need anything, call me. Anything at all.” And I swear she bats her eyes.

  For once, Berni doesn’t parry that she’s a talent agent, too.

  With Pete gone, Berni’s mother and several other women head over to the bartender. Whether Pete’s gotten them interested in the only other man left in the room or they need to dull their senses is anybody’s guess. Olivia grabs a cosmopolitan and saunters over to Berni with a smug grin plastered on her face.

  “This is soo good,” she says taking a long sip of her pink drink and pointing out just one more deprivation Berni must suffer in the name of motherhood. “It’s a shame you can’t drink. But didn’t you just love Pete? I figured a stripper was just what you needed since you probably can’t have any sex these days.”

  “At least I did once,” Berni says, coming to her own defense.